Historians worry move could threaten archives
Every two months or so, Terry Loucks makes the five-hour drive from his home in Magog to his childhood town of Arvida, in Saguenay, where he can visit his old high school or drive by the three houses where he was raised.
His parents moved there in 1942 to work for Alcan, the kind of people who “had Alcan tattooed on their bodies.”
The one thing Loucks always does there, too, is visit the local library, where he can leaf through old copies of Le Lingot, a newspaper for Alcan employees.
He finds photos of his father he likes to copy, and reads up on Alcan’s history. A favourite is an issue from 1967, with a picture of his father receiving an aluminum watch to mark his 25th year with the company. The 67-year-old Loucks holds onto the watch today.
As Rio Tinto Alcan prepares to move into the Deloitte Tower located beside the Bell Centre next fall, dropping the name Alcan from its signage, a group of researchers and historians are worried about what will happen to the company’s extensive archives.
“Just the Lingot alone is one archive,” Loucks said, “but Alcan has beautiful archives, their own photographers, tons and tons of history and it absolutely has to be preserved. It worries me immensely that it won’t be.”
Thousands of black and white photographs, artifacts, and important paperwork tracing the company’s existence since 1902 have always been stored away in its Maison Alcan headquarters on Sherbrooke St. W.
“When Alcan developed Quebec territory in the 20th century, they were always very conscious of their structural role in the society and abundantly documented everything they did,” said researcher and professor Lucie Morisset, who first used the archives in the early 1990s and last used them in 2013.
“There’s a gold mine of iconic photos, of manuscripts, of film on every project they did in Quebec and in Canada,” she added. “It’s a priceless bank of documents.”
They’re private archives, but for years they were accessible to researchers through specific requests while the company employed archivists to oversee the library. Those archivists are no longer on staff today, and the company now has only one person in charge of the entire archives.
Throughout the years, parts of the archives were moved into storage, and some were placed in Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa.
Though Morisset says she’s con- fident Rio Tinto Alcan will properly handle the documents during the upcoming move, others fear that all those photos and paperwork will be lost in the shuffle, if not deliberately destroyed.
“The worst thing that could happen to the archives would be to park them somewhere in a warehouse, with no one looking over them, no resources, no archivists to ensure they’re well kept,” said Laurent Thibault, executive director of the Société historique du Saguenay. “That’s the absolute worst scenario.”
Thibault says the Saguenay organization has been putting together a collection of other archives that would fit perfectly with Alcan’s.
“Alcan is part of Quebec’s history, part of industrial history and part of modern history,” he said. “I don’t see why that heritage shouldn’t be protected.”
A spokesperson for Rio Tinto Alcan, Bryan Tucker, couldn’t say exactly what will happen to the archives after the move. But Tucker said changing buildings won’t change the way the company handles them, whether they end up at a supplier paid for safe keeping or in the Deloitte Tower.
“Like any responsible company, we take management of our archives very seriously,” he said. “There will be no change in the way we operate our archives after the move.”
Pierre Deschênes, a professor at Université du Québec à Chicoutimi and also a member of Saguenay’s historical society, said the group has been in talks with Rio Tinto Alcan about acquiring the archives and making a consultation space where they would be accessible.
When a company moves, he said, there’s always a fear of what can happen to its archives, including them being thrown out.
“What we’re saying is, instead of shredding them or losing them, we’re ready to recuperate them and preserve them,” he said.
“Every piece of paper can hold important information for a researcher.”
Deschênes said the group works closely with former Alcan directors, who are keen on seeing the old records preserved because “it’s them who built the company.”
Tucker said the request to have them moved to Saguenay is being analyzed and that Rio Tinto Alcan “will do what we feel is best.”
As for some of the more cumbersome artifacts and art collections found in the archives, an internal committee is looking into what to do with them, he said, “but we understand their historical significance and importance to our current and former employees.”